Maternal ambivalence: the side of motherhood no one talks about

An excerpt from Maternal Ambivalence: The Loving Moments & Bitter Truths of Motherhood.

What is maternal ambivalence?

Motherhood is a messy, loving process, filled with complicated and conflicting feelings that, though it’s hard to admit to, can even include passing moments of hate. The struggle a mother faces as she recognizes troublesome feelings equally allows her to discover new ways to engage with her child. This investigation of the mother within her social and psychic context brings an examination of her lived experience of maternal ambivalence in which all her emotions dwell together. When a mother can capture all her feelings, she is in the best place to access her losses and repair them. A mother’s capacity for fluidity, as opposed to rigidity, is central to developing resilience as a parent and a person. The honest experience of all facets of maternal love is what inspires and instills maternal wisdom.

The old silent approach simply hasn’t worked. And ignoring this fragile, vital part of mothering is neglecting a universal truth in every mother’s daily life. There needs to be an open discussion of all maternal emotions so that a mother can find and access help when she is at her wits’ end. Mothers need to talk about their full experience, and in the following chapters, many of them will.

We have a responsibility, to ourselves above all, to explore and own all our feelings and observe the tension that exists between opposing ones. By uncovering maternal ambivalence, we discover a safe place for fuller expression. Our ambivalence is an achievement well-earned rather than a failure to retreat from. I urge you to find your own words to own these complex and contradictory feelings. Naming them keeps us going as our conflicts and pain renew and fuel our love rather than depleting it. We evolve and transform. It’s a win-win.

Motherhood is a paradox of loving and not-so-loving moments—hope and hopelessness, making mistakes and learning from them, independence through dependence, the unknown and familiar, pleasure and pain, laughter and tears, closeness and distance, expansion and contraction, gain and loss. I want to allow moms to accept and honor all of these experiences with honesty, self-love, and forgiveness, so we can all get on with our mothering in the way that we need to.

One of my main challenges has been to find a comfortable place to understand what we all know but are afraid to talk about—that dark, unspoken feelings exist as a daily part of our mothering; they belong to us. I wonder about these feelings, and I need to find words for them. To say them aloud and to hear them. To normalize and demystify them. As mothers, we must free ourselves to choose the words that are right for us in our mothering, to truthfully describe it, and to question and lift judgments around it as we begin to understand its complexity. This paves the way for us to value our maternal ambivalence.

When I attempt to explain maternal ambivalence to people, it becomes clear that in the majority of cases, there is a misunderstanding about the meaning of the term. This doesn’t surprise me; I’m still refining it after more than ten years. Without Rozsika Parker’s groundbreaking thinking, we almost certainly would not have come as far as we have in the last half century in our understanding of mothering. Parker’s awareness of the myriad and conflicting feelings that compose the mother’s everyday experiences, together with her insistence that maternal hating feelings have worth, has deeply influenced my perception of mothering and the value of maternal ambivalence.

Despite the high regard I have for Parker’s work, I have moved away from an absolute reliance on her definition of maternal ambivalence as the mother’s loving and hating feelings sitting together.

This brings me to a major dilemma with this subject: Is it okay to hate? This is the elephant in the room when we talk about ambivalence.

While I believe that Parker used the word ‘”hatred” to disrupt and to encourage reflection and a deep and thoughtful pondering, this has not always been my experience. To this end, I have repurposed her thinking while holding firmly to her belief of the healing, redemptive forces of our disturbing emotions, which both push us to the edge and almost always bring some sort of renewal afterward. As I continue to home in on maternal ambivalence, a few main ideas are emerging for me.

While Parker focuses on love and hate in her definition of maternal ambivalence, I have noticed something missing. While she does encourage a dialogue with maternal hatred and pays attention to the rhythm of maternal ambivalence, its push and pull, there remains a lack of attention to the degree of complexity that belongs to the mother’s everyday experience. Parker’s definition doesn’t take into account the variations and shades that exist in the mother’s loving emotions, such as feelings of enjoyment, compassion, delight, and in her darker emotions, including fear, resentment, shame, guilt, despair, and abhorrence. All these sensations must be named, claimed, and given breathing space. Naming a feeling gives it meaning and makes it real.

When we discover a descriptive word or a phrase that echoes our lived experience, we undergo transformation, a wow moment. A descriptive word or phrase speaks to us; we are in rhythm with it. It helps us to claim our experience. It’s a relief; it helps us feel whole. Naming an experience also contributes to normalizing it. Once a word is spoken, it is granted a place as well as permission to expand on feelings around it. It humanizes the experience.

My own struggle with how to describe maternal ambivalence and to incorporate it into my work as well as my life is perhaps best exemplified in a conversation I had with my niece, the mother of four children, both teenagers and young adults. She said it so succinctly: “We all as moms have our own words for our own feelings; they belong to us.” (She, who minces no words, may also have been warning me not to put words in her mouth.) Then she told me that she finds maternal ambivalence constantly in the countless everyday interactions with her children. This is the jewel for her. Now she can identify her feelings, a conflicting and puzzling array of sensations that surprise, shock, confuse, and renew her. They allow her to keep showing up. They allow her to achieve her love. These are her melting moments, when her distressing feelings, whether she knows them as anger, resentment, pity, loneliness, or even flashes of hate, meet with her love. These moments signal maternal ambivalence.